Not Yet Fifty

Several years after the destruction of legendary Ys, Gratillonius, the former Roman Centurion from Britannia who had unexpectedly become King of that fabulous, Christ-cursed city, is not yet fifty years of age yet now leads a completely different life as a tribune in Armorica where he finds it necessary to organize a local defense force against barbarian attacks without any Imperial support and has remarried to a younger woman with whom he has started a family after losing most members of his extended Ysan family in the inundation of their city.

His reign there had lasted seventeen years, a considerable period although less than half of his life to date. He has outlived a lot of close friends and several sworn enemies but many of the issues in his career remain unresolved. "The King of Ys" is now merely an honorary title but it is how he is still known by many Ysan survivors.

One moral of this story is that none of us is any one thing. We can identify a man with the most prominent or spectacular part of his career but there is always more to him than that especially when we take into account unrealized potentialities, e.g., in this case that, had events gone differently, then "King Grallon," as he was known to the Ysans, would have led their colonization of North America.